The asylum felt quieter than it should've.
Not peaceful, never peaceful. More like a space abandoned mid-sentence. As though something had happened here, and everyone forgot to tell the walls about it.
Willensburg sat in the surveillance room, the old leather chair beneath him creaking every time he shifted his weight. The lighting was dim, just the cold glow of a dozen security monitors illuminating his face. Each screen showed a different angle of the asylum: empty hallways, untouched patient rooms, the lobby where the front doors hadn't opened in months.
But the cameras were still running. The asylum might have been dead, but it still watched.
A figure leaned against the doorway, arms crossed, a cigarette smoldering between his lips though the sign outside clearly read NO SMOKING. His face was marked by a thick, jagged scar running from his temple down to the corner of his mouth.
The skin was warped, reddened, and tight from freshly burns, though not from fire as most would've guessed.
It had been water. Boiling water. He took a long drag and let the smoke escape through his teeth like a man trying to poison whatever was left of himself.
"You know," the guard began, voice low and coarse, "I still don't get it." Willensburg didn't look up from the file in his hand. The man always had a file in his hand. Thick, off-white paper, frayed edges, and bold black letters stamped across the front: Noah Solice. Beneath it, written in smaller, clinical text:
Memory Loss: 97%
Patient ID: 0001
Status: Escaped
Willensburg turned a page, then another, as though he hadn't heard. The guard stepped farther into the room, letting the heavy door swing half-shut behind him with a soft thunk.
"That we let him go," the man went on, gritting his teeth. "I mean, fuck's sake, Willensburg. Look at me." He jabbed a thumb at his ruined face. "You know what he did? Boiling water. smashed it right onto my face like it was nothing. You know what that feels like?"
"You were never meant to stop him," Willensburg replied, still not lifting his gaze from the papers. The guard let out a bitter, humorless laugh. "Yeah, no shit. I wasnt supposed to get boiled alive either. Truly a great grand master plan. Let the golden boy think he's free. Let him crawl around out there, like a rat in a maze he doesn't know he's trapped in."
He gestured toward the flickering monitors. "And for what? What's the point, Willensburg? He's dangerous, always was. Even when he doesn't know his own damn identity. You should've seen his eyes right before he did it. Like he wasn't even looking at me, like I wasn't even there. Like something else was watching through him."
Willensburg finally looked up. Not at the guard. At the monitors. One in particular. A feed from the lower wing.
A figure lay motionless on the narrow bed inside. A body half-swallowed by thin hospital sheets, skin ghostly, hair splayed dark against the pillow. The monitors around the bed beeped softly, a steady line of life barely registering on the machines.
Ezekiel. Still and unmoving. He had collapsed right after closing the door. A machine hissed quietly beside him, releasing whatever cocktail of chemicals they'd been pumping into his veins for the past week. Willensburg's eyes flicked to the heart monitor, a steady, sluggish beat. Not gone. Not yet.
"Because," he said quietly, "we couldn't delete more of his memories. Not yet. Even if we wanted to." The guard frowned. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"There's a limit," Willensburg murmured, leaning back in his chair. "To how much a mind can take before it stops being…useful. Before it unravels beyond repair. Noah's near that threshold. Push him one step further and we risk him losing his sanity completely. If he loses all willpower for living, it will be all for naught. This is a precaution."
"Precaution?" the guard spat. "You call this precaution? You've cut his mind to ribbons. He doesn't even know who he is anymore. He's already on his last straw of sanity"
"Exactly." The word hung in the air, heavy as a loaded gun. Willensburg's fingers tapped the edge of the file. "He's fractured, not broken. Fractured things can still be reshaped. Broken ones…" He trailed off, his gaze steady on the monitors. "Well. That's a different story."
The guard shook his head and began pacing, smoke trailing behind him like a restless ghost. "I still don't get it," he muttered. "Why not finish the job? Wipe him clean, turn him into a vegetable. You people have the means. God knows you've done worse to others." Willensburg didn't respond, but a flicker of something, amusement, maybe, tugged at the corner of his mouth.
The guard glanced at the monitors, then back at the file. "And what's with this place anyway? Feels like a goddamn tomb. No one's here. No other patients, no visitors, barely even staff anymore. You ever notice that?"
Willensburg didn't move.
"It's like… like the whole damn asylum's just here for him," the guard went on, voice quieter now, like he wasn't sure he was supposed to say it. "Every room's empty. Every file cabinet's got his name in it. Every schedule, every staff briefing, every order. It's all about him. No one else. Not anymore."
Willensburg slowly closed the file and folded his hands atop it.
"There was never anyone else." The guard froze. "Bullshit," he said, but his voice cracked. Willensburg smirked, just barely. "You think this was a hospital?" he asked softly. "It was a containment unit. Always has been."
The words slipped into the room like a knife into warm flesh. Somewhere down the hall, a light flickered and died. No one moved to fix it. The monitors kept watching. The guard swallowed hard, his bravado fraying at the edges.
"D'you ever think about what it was like before him?" he asked, softer this time, trying to claw his way back to something familiar. "When this place had… you know. Real patients. People to talk to. When we weren't just chasing a ghost."
Willensburg's eyes drifted back to the monitor showing Ezekiel. "There was no before him," he murmured.
"You're lying." "I don't need to." The guard stared at him a long moment, then blew out a sharp breath and turned toward the door. "This place is cursed," he muttered again. "And so is he."
Willensburg's gaze never left the screens. Never left Ezekiel.
"He'll come back," he said, quieter now. "He will bring him back."
And the way he said it, not as a threat, not as a hope, but as an inevitable fact, made the guard's stomach turn. Because deep down, in the part of himself he tried not to look at too closely, he knew Willensburg was right.
Noah Solice would come back.
And when he did, nothing in this crumbling, godforsaken asylum would stop what came next.